Report 1691
Report #1691 Skillset: Music Skill: Compose Org: Glomdoring Status: Completed Aug 2017 Furies' Decision: Tentative approval, but may reject or modify depending on coding limitations. Problem: This is sort of quality of life and ease of use report. The idea came to me after helping a few new bards learn how to use their songs. Bard songs are a bit clunky to use right now mainly due to the active effects. I'll do a quick run down of how they work to make sure everyone's up to date. Bards are best having their passive effects in their song list and just switching out to active effects when they wish to cast the active effect and then switch right back to the passive effect immediately after. -------------This can be done with a bit of coding but I was hoping to get a game side command to let us do it without everyone having to build a song tracker into their client. You build a bit of a song tracker to follow what stanza your on then essentially what we do is send compose songname stanza (7/8/9) imbue crowcaw/princessfarwell etc/ to load the effect we want then do perform songname song target to hit the target with that song effect, then we do compose songname stanza (7/8/9) imbue windowmercy or what ever to switch back. So your doing three commands for one effect and have to have your system track which stanza your on. If you don't track it right you'll sing a song with no active effect that wont do anything really other than refresh your song timer. 9 R: 0 Solution #1: Build in a new command to compose songs. As follows (perform songname target songeffect) this will do a similar thing to what was described above. EG Perform songname veyils crowcaw. Will attempt to switch crowcaw into what ever current stanza you are on and attempt to play it. If you are in the wrong stanza group you'll simply get an error message. You are on the wrong stanza group to play that. "You must be on stanza seven eight or ninth to play that." This itself will cut down on the players system side tracking allowing them to use the commands without having to have a stanza tracker built in. R: 0 Solution #2: As above but also with a default song setting. So that after casting the active effect the song will revert back to the passive song styling. It would be nice and user friendly. With a toggle so people can choose to use this or no. Config it on or off. Player Comments: ---on 8/1 @ 18:41 sets as pending ---on 8/18 @ 00:40 writes: What if active effects could just be played on their own if you're in a correct stanza (and applying the correct lyrics). This would be a very slight buff but offhand I don't think it'd be significant for any spec. ---on 8/20 @ 17:50 writes: I think it's something often done and often struggled with. While it can be done through code, it's also really clunky and unwieldy, especially for younger bards or people who're not that good at coding. Supported ---on 8/27 @ 23:12 writes: Hmm that may be an easier way of doing it Shedrin I guess. Well what ever works for implementation but your suggestions basically does the same as this but in a different way. Like I said there is nothing stopping you doing the active effect and switching back instantly to the passive so you never lose the passive effects(but requires coding a bit of a system for tracking etc blah blah) Simply letting you cast the active without having to switch in and out of song effects sounds a decent idea to me. ---on 8/28 @ 14:20 writes: I kind of like Shed's idea (similar to how monks can use specific skills out of form, like gahtirak'sho). I think Shed's idea is probably easier to code, and will help a bit more for bards, since it will only be one single command which means it will only go through one round of command denial. Sol1 your still looking at two rounds of command denial. Sol 2 is pretty much the same thing as Shed's idea but just adding unneeded steps IMO. Biggest question I have is will using Shed's command result in the bard moving forward in stanza, or will it more act like monks out of form actions (which keep you at the same stance). If it will advance stanza, I'm for that over these 2 solutions, if it won't then I'd rather see either Sol1 or 2. (The reason why I don't want bards to be able to stay at a stanza if they use the out of song command is because monks have a penalty for using out of form commands in the fact that they drop out of stance after some time if they don't use a form (which is a static timer), where as bards can sit in the same stanza for a long while, with the length dependent on a variety of factors. Allowing them to use an out of stanza syntax will essentially allow them to sit at stanza 9 forever with all passive effects, and use their targetted skills whenever power permits, while refraining to keep the song up every so often. *yes I know this isn't really practical since another bard can force you out of song easily, just listing the possibilities*)